A pallet container is known from DE 3,418,301 C2 comprising an inner container of plastic which is surrounded, for the purpose of stacking, by a supporting frame in the form of a casing in contact with the plastic inner container, this casing exhibiting a sheet-metal jacket with a lid and a bottom and being equipped with strongly rounded upending edges and corners. This casing is mounted on a flat pallet of wood, cutouts in the lid and in the sheet-metal jacket permitting access to the filling and, respectively, discharge openings of the container.
The wooden pallet utilized in this known pallet container is not suitable, on account of the unsatisfactory dimensional stability due to the wooden material, for stacking in high-level shelf storage facilities by means of shelf-servicing devices, the use of which requires stacking goods having positioning surfaces permitting exact stacking of the stacking item into and a flawless removal of the stacking item out of high-level shelf storage facilities. Furthermore, the wooden pallet has a shorter lifetime as compared with the outer jacket with bottom and lid of steel sheet whereby a premature replacement of the container becomes necessary when utilizing the pallet container as a multiple-trip container.
The pallet container known from DE 3,039,635 C2, with a plastic inner container attached to a wooden pallet and exhibiting an outer jacket of intersecting, horizontal and vertical lattice bars of metal, exhibits the same disadvantages as the pallet container according to DE 3,418,301 C2.
The pallet container according to DE 2,947,603 C2, with a steel-tube pallet on which a plastic inner container with a sheet-metal jacket is mounted, does avoid the aforedescribed drawbacks of known pallet containers with wooden pallet, but still shares the disadvantages with this prior art that, for reasons of fixation and stability, the plastic inner container must be attached to the pallet with a separate bottom, and that residual emptying is very cumbersome inasmuch as the pallet must be lifted, for this purpose, on the side in opposition to the emptying aperture of the inner container.
The pallet container of this type in accordance with EP 363,668 A1 has an outer jacket made up of horizontal and vertical lattice bars of round steel welded together at the points of intersection. The pallet, fashioned as a bottom, consists of a lattice with intersecting lattice bars forming a grating-like bottom surface and bent into feet in the downward direction at the rim of the bottom surface, these feet defining a certain distance of the bottom surface with respect to the placement surface of the pallet container. The vertical lattice bars of the outer jacket are extended into the zone of the setting-up surface and welded to the downwardly bent bars of the lattice bottom of the pallet.
For reasons of stability, the lattice bars of the lattice jacket and of the pallet formed as a lattice bottom must be dimensioned correspondingly strongly so that the pallet container according to EP 363,668 A1 has a high inherent weight which raises the shipping costs. Furthermore, this conventional pallet container is expensive from the viewpoint of manufacturing technique on account of the numerous welding spots. Finally, this pallet container is not designed, either, for convenient residual emptying.
In the pallet containers cited in connection with the state of the art, the pallets are in each case designed especially for the mounting of an outer jacket of sheet metal or of lattice bars for the plastic inner container.
The pallets of the above-described pallet containers are all subject to being endangered, impairing transport safety, by sonar vibrations emanating during transport from the liquid filling material and by vibrations transmitted by the transport vehicle.